The title of this blog post – which you shouldn’t read – is wrong. It should go “Blog Posts Not To Write” because
- a) I’m repeating myself
- b) It will change nothing
- c) It will probably irritate well-meaning and hard-working people and what does it really matter if their efforts ‘fail’, because at a civilisational level, failure is (very) baked in.
But I spent a little time today with a journalist, recounting the long sordid history of the COPs, and it’s put me in an even-more-than-usual funk. Rather than process that, by, say – charging up and down the nearby slope with a weighted jacket and a backpack of bricks for 70 minutes – I am going to write an ill-advised rant. Can’t say I didn’t warn me, and you.
It’s this. The National Emergency Briefing is (as implied in the name) fatally wedded to an information deficit/scraped knee model of social ‘change.’ This is not a surprise, but there it is. My views are coloured by my general sense of nihilism, yes, but ALSO by the circumstances where I saw the 50 minute film – one of the worst (beyond comically bad) events I have ever attended, and that is saying something.
Yesterday I read this earnest and informative blog post by a university student doing an internship with the NEB people. It’s about a showing which was, predictably enough, attended by the grey hairs and the white hairs.
I would encourage you to read it. It’s got good stuff.
“That has probably been my biggest takeaway from working on the People’s Emergency Briefing. A film can open the door, but what happens around it matters too in terms of who is invited into the room, whether people have space to talk through what they have heard, and whether there is an obvious next step once they leave.”
But this is the problem. The ‘activation’ the NEB people are looking for is to put pressure on MPs so that the Prime Minister hosts a televised national emergency briefing. This, they think, will be the Batman slap that “everyone” needs.
But would such a broadcast be seen beyond those already switched on? Unless it was across all channels simultaneously “compulsory to watch”?
Why would it actually change the minds of the un-decideds/the uninformed? Why would a panel made up of various worthies (and even David Attenborough) ‘cut through’ to the vast numbers of people who don’t know much and don’t WANT to know much? And even if it did, then what? It’s not minds we need to change, but habits – and systems – of production and consumption. That’s a taller order. At absolute best, a “successful” NEB would lead to a few months of government/corporate pledges that were then forgotten/ignored. We’ve been here several times before. [“Extinction Rebellion says we quit: Why Radical Eco-activism has a short shelf life.”]
What is needed (but won’t happen, and can’t happen, and even if it could it is basically too late – we are in the Fafocene and are just going to have to suck it up) is for people in the ‘West’ with freedom of information/speech and assembly to (drumroll pls) form and maintain small groups that can federate and co-ordinate and resist co-optation, repression and exhaustion while bringing more and more people on-board and create civil society pressure and so force governments/states and corporations to behave radically in defence of the last shreds of ecological stability between us and abject breakdown and then, over time, reverse what damage can be reversed.
This is ridiculous to type. I am disgusted with myself for even bothering. It won’t happen, it can’t happen. And even if it could, we have had four decades of increasing emissions (20bn tonnes annually in 1988, up to 40bn tonnes now) and those emissions have thickened the blanket of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. All that heat is melting icesheets, changing weather patterns. The Jenga tower is no longer juddering as more blocks are taken out – it is starting to sway and next it will topple.
“We” were warned not to jump off the skyscraper. We decided to go ahead anyway and heck, someone will invent a parachute. We’ve passed a bunch of floors on the way to the pavement (or ‘sidewalk’ if you’re American) and as we pass each one, you can hear us saying “so far so good”. Or “we should hold a National Emergency Briefing”.
Coda from Yoda (“judge me by my sighs, do you?”)
If you’re reading this and you are thinking “why doesn’t this miserable a-hole shut his cakehole?” it’s an excellent question and I don’t have an answer, beyond “nobody put a gun to your head to read this and you were in fact warned.” If you’re following up that thought with “he never proposes anything positive of his own” you are absolutely wrong, but I don’t really have the energy to provide a list of links. This is a start though –
As to why nothing will change, I could go all “real subsumption of Civil Society by Capital” on yo ass. But instead, I invoke Cher, incentive structures and our inevitable doom.
And a bonus acronym – CARDIAC –